Glasses, by Henry James

IV

One day in the course of the following June there was ushered into my studio a gentleman whom I had
not yet seen but with whom I had been very briefly in correspondence. A letter from him had expressed to me some days
before his regret on learning that my “splendid portrait” of Titras Flora Louisa Saunt, whose full name figured by her
own wish in the catalogue of the exhibition of the Academy, had found a purchaser before the close of the private view.
He took the liberty of inquiring whether I might have at his service some other memorial of the same lovely head, some
preliminary sketch, some study for the picture. I had replied that I had indeed painted Miss Saunt more than once and
that if he were interested in my work I should be happy to show him what I had done. Mr. Geoffrey Dawling, the person
thus introduced to me, stumbled into my room with awkward movements and equivocal sounds — a long, lean, confused,
confusing young man, with a bad complexion and large, protrusive teeth. He bore in its most indelible pressure the
postmark, as it were, of Oxford, and as soon as he opened his mouth I perceived, in addition to a remarkable revelation
of gums, that the text of the queer communication matched the registered envelope. He was full of refinements and
angles, of dreary and distinguished knowledge. Of his unconscious drollery his dress freely partook; it seemed, from
the gold ring into which his red necktie was passed to the square toe-caps of his boots, to conform with a high sense
of modernness to the fashion before the last. There were moments when his overdone urbanity, all suggestive stammers
and interrogative quavers, made him scarcely intelligible; but I felt him to be a gentleman and I liked the honesty of
his errand and the expression of his good green eyes.

As a worshipper at the shrine of beauty however he needed explaining, especially when I found he had no acquaintance
with my brilliant model; had on the mere evidence of my picture taken, as he said, a tremendous fancy to her face. I
ought doubtless to have been humiliated by the simplicity of his judgment of it, a judgment for which the rendering was
lost in the subject, quite leaving out the element of art. He was like the innocent reader for whom the story is
“really true” and the author a negligible quantity. He had come to me only because he wanted to purchase, and I
remember being so amused at his attitude, which I had never seen equally marked in a person of education, that I asked
him why, for the sort of enjoyment he desired, it wouldn’t be more to the point to deal directly with the lady. He
stared and blushed at this: it was plain the idea frightened him. He was an extraordinary case — personally so modest
that I could see it had never occurred to him. He had fallen in love with a painted sign and seemed content just to
dream of what it stood for. He was the young prince in the legend or the comedy who loses his heart to the miniature of
the out-land princess. Until I knew him better this puzzled me much — the link was so missing between his sensibility
and his type. He was of course bewildered by my sketches, which implied in the beholder some sense of intention and
quality; but for one of them, a comparative failure, he ended by conceiving a preference so arbitrary and so lively
that, taking no second look at the others, he expressed the wish to possess it and fell into the extremity of confusion
over the question of the price. I simplified that problem, and he went off without having asked me a direct question
about Miss Saunt, yet with his acquisition under his arm. His delicacy was such that he evidently considered his rights
to be limited; he had acquired none at all in regard to the original of the picture. There were others — for I was
curious about him — that I wanted him to feel I conceded: I should have been glad of his carrying away a sense of
ground acquired for coming back. To insure this I had probably only to invite him, and I perfectly recall the impulse
that made me forbear. It operated suddenly from within while he hung about the door and in spite of the diffident
appeal that blinked in his gentle grin. If he was smitten with Flora’s ghost what mightn’t be the direct force of the
luminary that could cast such a shadow? This source of radiance, flooding my poor place, might very well happen to be
present the next time he should turn up. The idea was sharp within me that there were complications it was no mission
of mine to bring about. If they were to occur they might occur by a logic of their own.

Let me say at once that they did occur and that I perhaps after all had something to do with it. If Mr. Dawling had
departed without a fresh appointment he was to reappear six months later under protection no less adequate than that of
our young lady herself. I had seen her repeatedly for months: she had grown to regard my studio as the tabernacle of
her face. This prodigy was frankly there the sole object of interest; in other places there were occasionally other
objects. The freedom of her manners continued to be stupefying; there was nothing so extraordinary save the absence in
connection with it of any catastrophe. She was kept innocent by her egotism, but she was helped also, though she had
now put off her mourning, by the attitude of the lone orphan who had to be a law unto herself. It was as a lone orphan
that she came and went, as a lone orphan that she was the centre of a crush. The neglect of the Hammond Synges gave
relief to this character, and she paid them handsomely to be, as every one said, shocking. Lord Iffield had gone to
India to shoot tigers, but he returned in time for the private view: it was he who had snapped up, as Flora called it,
the gem of the exhibition.

My hope for the girl’s future had slipped ignominiously off his back, but after his purchase of the portrait I tried
to cultivate a new faith. The girl’s own faith was wonderful. It couldn’t however be contagious: too great was the
limit of her sense of what painters call values. Her colours were laid on like blankets on a cold night. How indeed
could a person speak the truth who was always posturing and bragging? She was after all vulgar enough, and by the time
I had mastered her profile and could almost with my eyes shut do it in a single line I was decidedly tired of her
perfection. There grew to be something silly in its eternal smoothness. One moved with her moreover among phenomena
mismated and unrelated; nothing in her talk ever matched with anything out of it. Lord Iffield was dying of love for
her, but his family was leading him a life. His mother, horrid woman, had told some one that she would rather he should
be swallowed by a tiger than marry a girl not absolutely one of themselves. He had given his young friend unmistakable
signs, but he was lying low, gaining time: it was in his father’s power to be, both in personal and in pecuniary ways,
excessively nasty to him. His father wouldn’t last for ever — quite the contrary; and he knew how thoroughly, in spite
of her youth, her beauty and the swarm of her admirers, some of them positively threatening in their passion, he could
trust her to hold out. There were richer, cleverer men, there were greater personages too, but she liked her “little
viscount” just as he was, and liked to think that, bullied and persecuted, he had her there so luxuriously to rest
upon. She came back to me with tale upon tale, and it all might be or mightn’t. I never met my pretty model in the
world — she moved, it appeared, in exalted circles — and could only admire, in her wealth of illustration, the grandeur
of her life and the freedom of her hand.

I had on the first opportunity spoken to her of Geoffrey Dawling, and she had listened to my story so far as she had
the art of such patience, asking me indeed more questions about him than I could answer; then she had capped my
anecdote with others much more striking, revelations of effects produced in the most extraordinary quarters: on people
who had followed her into railway-carriages; guards and porters even who had literally stuck there; others who had
spoken to her in shops and hung about her house-door; cabmen, upon her honour, in London, who, to gaze their fill at
her, had found excuses to thrust their petrifaction through the very glasses of four-wheelers. She lost herself in
these reminiscences, the moral of which was that poor Mr. Dawling was only one of a million. When therefore the next
autumn she flourished into my studio with her odd companion at her heels her first care was to make clear to me that if
he was now in servitude it wasn’t because she had run after him. Dawling hilariously explained that when one wished
very much to get anything one usually ended by doing so — a proposition which led me wholly to dissent and our young
lady to asseverate that she hadn’t in the least wished to get Mr. Dawling. She mightn’t have wished to get him, but she
wished to show him, and I seemed to read that if she could treat him as a trophy her affairs were rather at the ebb.
True there always hung from her belt a promiscuous fringe of scalps. Much at any rate would have come and gone since
our separation in July. She had spent four months abroad, where, on Swiss and Italian lakes, in German cities, in
Paris, many accidents might have happened.